


Nidhogg and Estinien's Excellent Adventure

by purplekitte



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Black Comedy, Crack, Demonic Possession, Gen, Mutant Hate, POV Nonhuman, Purposeful use of anachronistic language, Random bits of spoiler for the paladin 50-60 questline, Sharing a Body, Spoilers for 3.3, then stops being serious and starts being ridiculous again, which randomly gets really dark for a paragraph or two at a time, with influence from the Animorphs fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-17 07:30:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8135548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplekitte/pseuds/purplekitte
Summary: Nidhogg travels across Dravania and Coerthas gathering his army for war. Or, he tries to.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The majority of this starting life as a giggly conversation my boyfriend and I once had over lunch about all the time that must have passed between 3.0 and 3.3, and just how sparsely populated with dragons the 3.3 cut-scenes are, all things considered.

Nidhogg, returned from the dead in the body of the Azure Dragoon, called his brood and followers to him. In his once-fortress of the Aery, he spoke unto the great wyrm Vyrgrdr, and Vyrgrdr said unto him:

“Just let me finish this craft. I’ve hired some moogles to help me with a new roost. As soon as I’ve got this stack of synths done and finished this vat of seafood stew; just give me a few decades to find a good stopping point where everything’s structurally sound.”

Nidhogg growled under his breath, not that impressive in his human voice, and turned to Herfjotur, “And thee?”

“That eggs I’d laid hatched since last you called, so I have a new brood around the nest. My last brood might be interested.”

“They’re only three centuries old!”

“Yeah, but they’re itching to go find a new flock since I’m busy with the hatchlings. That’s how fledglings are.”

Nidhogg didn’t care about broodlings before they were fledged and able to fly into battle. Everything between siring them and that was their mothers’ problem.

“Fine. Look after the roost until I get back, with the blood of the betrayers under my claws.”

*

Nidhogg sputtered and gagged, spitting on the ground. “This is terrible.”

_Well, yes._

Half of Estinien’s life, Nidhogg had been the voice at the back of his head. Now he was the voice in Nidhogg’s. Estinien’s memories were an open book to him when he chose to look, but Estinien could talk to him whenever he chose, the one ability remaining to him.

“It’s still stuck in my throat, like a rock, and tastes terrible.”

_That’s why elezen don’t eat raw meat. Dumbass._

Annoyed at human weakness, he turned his dragon breath on the carcass of the hropken.

_Now it’s burnt on the outside and raw on the inside._

“Soon I will be able to devour the flesh of my enemies. I have no need of mortal culinary skills.”

Estinien didn’t particularly possess them either. _That’s why the Warrior of Light defeated you. No one should be that good at everything, but them’s the breaks._ He imagined good food as vividly as he could, which wasn’t that clear but at least induced a sudden craving for fresh baked bread.

“I will obtain supplies in Tailfeather,” Nidhogg announced, “for your weak, mortal body.”

*

But, before that, his followers still held Sohm Al itself, especially Tioman’s brood-sisters and those of Hraesvelgr’s brood who followed him.

“Sorry, I’m seeing this heretic, like my father and Shiva, and I don’t want to cause her trouble while she’s still alive. In a couple decades, I’ll see how I feel.”

“My wing got real torn up by a lance last time we attacked the Steps of Faith. It’ll be a couple decades and a lot of physical therapy before I’m back in shape for that kind of flying.”

“I’m fine with killing Ishgardians, sure, but not a civil war. If you’re going to make it for you or against you among dragons and go after Vidofnir, then I’m against you.”

“You’re all cowards and traitors who will rest in the caverns of Mourn in disgrace,” Nidhogg spat behind him.

But he descended the mountain through the cliffs of the foothills rather than going through the Anyx Trine gateway, because he had more elezen to kill before he had dragons. And he’d have an army at his back. Any time now.

*

As Estinien was less recognizable as the Azure Dragoon without his full drachen mail, he also wasn’t so recognizable as the host of the dread Nidhogg without his ruby plate bonded with giant glowing eyes and his burning veins showing through the frail skin. His human eyes were a fiendish, draconic red, but people had red eyes, that was a thing. Estinien assured him that wearing the furs of a hunter over armor merely made him look like an idiot.

_Walk through a river._

“Why would I do that?”

 _You_ reek _._

Nidhogg sniffed himself. There was, as Estinien had pointed out, a certain rank odor to his body, especially near the shoulders. The olfactory sensory information was sharp, acidic, with hints of ash and loam. He wrinkled his nose. “Elezen use their noses too much, like dogs.”

_Do you want to go in there and be treated like a prospector or like a crazy hermit?_

“I could burn it down for their insolence.”

He felt that bring Estinien up short. He didn’t want that to happen. _You can’t very well raze it then plunder it, with as little as will be left. Do you want mortal supplies or not? Do you want to sell those chocobo or eat more feathers with your cooking skills? Now brush my hair._

“This is ridiculous.”

_You were the one who lost or broke all my hair ties. It should be much neater than this._

“This water is too cold.”

_Poor soft-skinned dragon, such a whiny baby. Have you spent any time in Coerthas since the Calamity, or is that why you’ve been hibernating?_

“Shut up.”

*

“Arngrimnr, you fought with Vishap. Now fight with me.”

“I just molted and need to wait for my new scales to come in and harden. It’ll be another twenty years before I’m at all comfortable with my armoring.”

This skin did look rather oily and smooth. Estinien helpfully provided a vivid daydream of spearing him with his lance and it sinking right through to meat and bone without resistance.

“Fine, carry on then.”

*

“Why does this body hurt so?”

Nidhogg sneezed. There was some fire involved, but not enough to make it dignified or to evaporate the wet and sticky mucus dripping down his face.

 _We’re merely ill,_ Estinien said as dismissively as possible. _Picked it up in Tailfeather I’d suppose._

Yet there was a hint of something else, underneath the fact he was genuinely miserable as well from not being able to breathe right, the pain in his head and throat, the heat and the chills. “You had me bathing in frozen rivers on purpose, that you might take a chill and die.”

Estinien made a mental _tch_ sound.

Nidhogg’s anger rose, but he forced himself to speak Estinien’s language of passive-aggressiveness. “You are to be congratulated, Azure Dragoon. You are a thorn in my side. You have inconvenienced me. You have pushed back the destruction of your city perhaps a week.”

_A week? I would be back in the field within two days?_

“I’m not falling for that again,” said Nidhogg, pretending Estinien had meant that as another assassination attempt rather than bragging and posturing. He wasn’t being weak or lazy; he just didn’t want to replace his meat-puppet. “I will kill a nursing yak and make tea. I remember an excellent yak stew recipe the Azure Dragoon Deaupiane de Haillenarte used when fighting Darkscale in the freezing mountain peaks to distract from the building of Dusk Vigil below. I will fortify the camp and build up the fire.”

He returned Estinien’s body for a few minutes, at the coughing fit his speech brought on. Estinien hacked reflexively, unable to convince his body to just let him die--as every person with a cold had wished at some point.

*

Nidhogg dreamed of the last thing he’d seen when his eyes had been properly fixed to his own skull. The pain and smell of blood in the air--the taste of it in his mouth, elezen flesh and bone, hot blood dripping down from the ruin of his own right eye. Through his left eye, Haldrath. A child, even by mortal standards. Nidhogg knew him, from the days things had been different, remembering politely sniffing the prince as an infant. Now his face was a snarl of rage as he drove the broken lance up through--

 _I am in the right,_ he'd thought. _I am here to avenge the cold-blooded murder of my sister. Ratatosktr was taken unawares. I, a dragon of the first brood, cannot be defeated by mere mortals. Not without my revenge. No! By the eyes of my father, if there is any justice in Hydaelyn, I cannot lose._

Estinien woke with his face wet with tears of rage and frustration. Without a doubt those had been his as much as Nidhogg’s, but he still spitefully forced himself to think, _Good. You deserve defeat. If you think I deserved to suffer as you suffered, then at least you felt the pain of it._ That kinship between them had sat uneasy with him since the Aery, robbing that victory of its satisfaction.

Nidhogg repaid him with equal spite, drawing up his memories of Ferndale to go with Estinien’s. (Maybe Ferndale. Nidhogg had destroyed many villages over many centuries, he could hardly tell them all apart.) _Was this your cousin I devoured or was she one of the ones crushed by falling timbers? Did your best friend burn or tear apart in my claws? Your parents I didn’t bother with killing personally; they were like insects to be squashed absently. Remember the smell of it, how difficult it was to tell the people from the sheep?_

Yet, this was familiar between them. For ten years, Nidhogg had haunted him. He could feel Nidhogg’s stung pride that Estinien should get any of his own preciously horded memories against his will. Moments of despair from his own life, from the lives of past Azure Dragoons, those were familiar to him. It was practically a lullaby and he was used to rolling over and going back to sleep. For years he had let his desire for vengeance grow too with each reminder, but now... Nidhogg was dead and it was for the Warrior of Light to slay him one last time. Estinien would die with him, which was rather convenient for keeping him from having to worry about what to do with the empty space in himself he hadn’t had time to examine after the Aery.

_If you’d merely killed us, you could have been done with it. Your desire to keep Ishgard alive so the descendants of Thordan can suffer over and over in each generation has trapped you here forever as well._

_There is no after,_ Nidhogg said.

 _Not for us,_ he agreed, but some part of him thought of others, wondered if there could be. For them, if not for him. Believing even for a moment it could be otherwise had been what had gotten him into this situation. Living had, for him, always been a curse. He was so, so tired.

He forced his thoughts to Ysayle--dead Ysayle, who was safe to remember and wouldn’t call Nidhogg’s wrath down on any living person he cared for, and envied her resting in her grave, and slept again.

*

Nidhogg stared up at the great rainbow dragon with the fox-like face, Skeold. Skeold snored.

He could not be woken from his nap, which could go on years or centuries, by Nidhogg’s majestic roar. He’d tried.

_Try doing something annoying. Well, there’s only one thing you’re good at annoying people with and that’s killing people’s families. Better yet, let me try. I’m sure I can induce something from sleep to violence with my charming personality._

“You are not the most annoying Azure Dragoon I’ve ever known. That was Ireneth de Braufent”-- _Saint Ireneth,_ Estinien instinctively corrected--“who sang hymns in her mind every moment she wasn’t singing them aloud to my left eye.”

_She was very pious._

“It was entirely spite. She did it to annoy me. I had to wake up from a quite nice nap I’d just laid down to two decades earlier to kill her just to shut her up.”

_I’m glad I never had to meet her personally, yet I find myself liking her._

“Shut up.”

_I know at least a dozen Temple Knight drinking songs popular in the Forgotten Knight before I even get to the ecclesiastical liturgies. Let’s see if I remember all the words._

“Shut up.”

*

“What’s a ‘Death’s Embrace’? Why are Ul’dahns camped out in the snows of Coerthas, though? I thought Ul’dah was in a desert.”

 _Fury only knows._ Estinien’s thoughts were not terribly helpful. He had never followed his lord commander there in person and knew it only as a far-away, decadent, gods-forsaken place. He did, on the other hand, know the people of Coerthas. _They’re smugglers, certainly. They are pretending to be bandits, but they’re too professional for what you usually see in Coerthas and Dravania. I would say assassins sent here after specific targets, and I would assume that is the Warrior of Light from my limited knowledge of Ul’dahn politics._

“I’m almost tempted to let them live just for that, but no one who... injured me in combat would be more than inconvenienced by these rabble.”

Nidhogg grinned, teeth pulled back, and for once Estinien grinned with him, of one mind about bloodshed.

*

“That new guy is being scolded by the chaplain for drinking on duty,” Luciae told Jantellot.

“That’s real foolish of him,” Jantellot said.

“He’s insisting we send out a patrol for heretic activity. He says he saw a lot of dead smugglers and a dragoon wrapped in foreign silks and velvet over and around his armor, shouting how good that fabric felt against his naked skin and how distracting and sensitive hands were compared to dragon claws, in between trying to fit an entire brick of imported chocolate into his mouth.”

“That’s the crux of it, now isn’t it? Everyone drinks and I wouldn’t put it past half the camp to drink until they can’t see straight, but making a fuss over it? You’ve got to learn to keep quiet. We really do get the dregs, now as ever, out in the Convictory.”

“Recruitment’s down. Well, at least it’s just drunk-talk and not real heretics. Until the Holy See sends down orders for what we _should_ be doing about them now, I’ll be happy to not seek them out.”

“Laying down with heretics and dragons,” Jantellot muttered, but voiced no further insult towards the lord commander of Ishgard, and he ordered no patrols.

*

Estinien’s body was strangely leaden by the time Nidhogg reached the top of the next snow-covered hill, and his thighs felt almost like they were burning despite the cold.

_I can’t believe you let my body get in this condition._

“I haven’t done anything.”

_Exactly. We can’t all have perfect dragon bodies that last us the ages. Mortals have to exercise to stay in shape._

Estinien’s memories unfortunately agreed. The simple fact was he was a man who had spent the majority of the waking hours of his adult life training with the lance, occasionally punctuated with hard travel and dragon slaying. He was not a man who had hobbies or friends or family; he had single-minded devotion to the art of the dragoon.

“You handle it.”

On one hand, Estinien was clearly tempted by the prospect of having control of his body back. He could feel everything that happened to him, but it wasn’t the same, wasn’t enough. This current burn in his muscles was almost pleasant—a visceral feeling of connection to his body despite Nidhogg relegating him to being a voice in his own mind. Nidhogg was not going to let him near his lance and would stop him from elusive jumping off a cliff, but to shake his own head, curl his own fingers, launch himself into the air... On the other hand, _Entertainment value._

“Estinien,” Nidhogg growled.

_Drop and give me twenty._

*

“Is it cloud mallow allergy season? It is, isn’t it? If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times: I’m not going to your big pre-invasion team meeting at the Aery during allergy season.”

“By my father’s scales, Yrenbend, this I’m not even having an invasion planning session and team-building get-together this time. We had one for the year before the last time I sent Vishap. Everyone _should_ still be in the zone from that and remember our mission statement.”

“Is Vyrgrdr too busy with building a new nest to cater?”

“This is not about culinarians. This is about going to Ishgard, not the Churning Mists.”

“...The winds off the Sea of Clouds must be bringing in all the pollen this season, and you’re trying to distract me from that, aren’t you?”

“Paranoid delusions. It was _one_ time and you will not let it go.”

 _Maybe it will be cloud mushroom season,_ Estinien provided helpfully, hopefully. _If you thought being sick was unpleasant before, I am allergic to their spores something terrible._

*

“What is your body--”

_Don’t ask._

“Does this have something to do with the dream you were having about whipped cream and--”

_No._

“Can you even bend that way? I refuse to try, because I’m almost certain I’ll sprain something--”

 _Shut up._ Nidhogg found himself gritting his teeth along with Estinien’s thoughts. His heartbeat rather was distractingly loud as well. _Give me five minutes with my body--I don’t try to kill myself and we never talk about this again._

Okay, that was fair.

*

Gazing upon the Steps of Faith, Nidhogg shook his head. So that recruitment drive had been less productive than he’d hoped. Give it a decade and enough of his forces would gather again at the call of his roar, though. He already had a couple of his most loyal generals and a couple dozen of the young rabble--those willing to instantly drop everything and those with nothing better to do anyway. He could deal with the Ishgardians, then trade some harsh words and claws with the traitors and fair-weather friends among his own kind.

 _You want to kill Aymeric? Personally? Because he’s interfering with the political status quo you want in Ishgard? Because he’s the best friend I have?_ Estinien put a whole life of being an asshole to use, perfectly aware Nidhogg could hear the unspoken ‘No, not him, anyone but him. He’s a good person. He can save Ishgard. He deserves better. Fuck, no.’ that rose from the bottom of his mind whether he wanted it to or not. _You’re going to have to hurry. He’s_ mortal _. Do you want to cut down a knight in the prime of his life or a doddering old man?_

“Elezen live for years. Decades even.” Exactly how many, he had never bothered to pay attention to. They weren’t born one spring and dead the following winter, though, even he had noticed that.

_This body will rot around you. Any year now I’ll elusive jump and break a hip. Today, yesterday, a millennia ago are all the same to a dragon. But being mortal, subject to time? Shall I count the seconds become hours, hours become days, days become years?_

Nidhogg found himself... not, afraid, but concerned. His revenge would not be thwarted by such a thing as mortal frailty. Those were for them, not him.

“As soon as my troops get here.”

_In dragon time?_

Nidhogg shifted, uneasy. “I should have eaten your knight in Falcon’s Nest.”

_But you didn’t. Big bad Nidhogg, too scared of arrows to stick around after making a threat. He needs an entire army to attack a half-broken gate because he’s so weak on his own._

“I could have destroyed Ishgard anytime for centuries. I was merely drawing out your suffering.”

_Uh huh._

“I will draw it out no longer. I have seen your weakness. You will see my power.”

His magic engulfed them, from his two eyes outward. He could take his own form rather than that of his host, it just cost aether. It would simply take him time to build a new, proper dragon body, as his father Midgardsormr did even now. Estinien would last that long, Nidhogg insisted even though he had no idea how long in mortal years it would take or his host would last. To be otherwise would inconvenience him.

He’s had Estinien’s memories to accustom him to his host’s bipedal build, but it was a bone-deep relief to have all four legs on the ground. To have his wings, his scales, his tail, his horn, his fangs and claws.

To spread his wings and take to the sky, up and up with each downstroke, it was elation. This was what dragoons sought with their jumps, yet always they fell back to earth unfulfilled. No wonder elezen envied dragons, the stunted, land-bound things that they were. He wondered if it were an innate trait of all dirt-grubbers or if the striving was a piece of Ratatosktr inside the Ishgardians. He hoped it was the latter, as he hoped they suffered for it.

For now... Well, he would see fire and blood painted on Ishgard and feast on Estinien’s hatred and fear, but for now he was a thing with wings and his Azure Dragoon could see what he saw, feel what he felt. For a moment, despite himself, Estinien loved flying.

_Do a barrel roll._


End file.
